This dissertation was written to give genealogists a new strategy to tackle brick-wall ancestors (ancestors for whom conventional methods have failed to produce results). The research focused on American women in the 19th century but is replicable for any ancestor with an unusual first name.

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The study explored what factors influenced name choice and what demographics were shared by women with that name. Genealogists can use these characteristics to prioritize search order at archives with offline (non-digitized or non-indexed) record sets. These types of records must be analyzed by reading stacks of documents, so being able to prioritize one record set over another (i.e., search Catholic church records before Jewish temple records) benefits the genealogist, who often has a limited amount of time at the archive.

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This research compared the demographics of the average American to those of women sharing each of the twenty studied names. Data analysis was used to find commonalities in religion, birthplace (for women and their parents), literacy, race, and household occupation of 1,124 named women. Anthroponymy and onomastica provided uncommon variants and linguistic insight into how these names emerged and evolved.

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The research established that most unusual names yield at least one actionable characteristic. For instance, an efficient researcher seeking ‘Gertrude’ would search for uncommon variants such as Trudi or Traudl in addition to prioritizing German archives, such as immigration documents or German community records.

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This author found little literature outlining how to perform a study on unusual first names, but other researchers hinted that this research would be valuable. Therefore, this study proposed a methodology for other researchers to use, tailored to their level of technical expertise.

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